My jaw is still on the floor.

[Billbags]

@ slaveforanunnak1

While we are still on the blog comments, here is a Szabo comment that made me realize a small difference of opinion between Szabo and Satoshi. It's about the use of the term Cryptocurrency.

*Satoshi used the term Cryptocurrency.
Quote from: satoshi on July 06, 2010, 06:32:35 PM
"Announcing version 0.3 of Bitcoin, the P2P cryptocurrency!"


*In 2011 Szabo still would not use the term Cryptocurrency.
Szabo Quote: from 2011
"And what's up with the term "cryptocurrency"? What is it supposed to mean? Cryptography is used to protect payments systems as radically different as credit cards, Chaumian digital cash, and Bitcoin. The term encourages the popular but profoundly naive view of Bitcoin as merely another form of digital cash."

Note: could be a misdirection by Szabo or maybe a sign of the doppelganger theory. It may not mean anything, just something I noticed.

Interesting. I'm starting to look more closely at Zooko

The thing with Zooko always comes back to money, or lack of it. He has several projects he is trying to get going but doesn't have the funds. He really cares about the new science he is into and I think if he had the coins, he would definitely be using them.

That's why I'm thinking he may have been the coder only. He was definitely posting about BitCoin on January 26 2009. He had the time to do the work. He knew the right people. He lived and worked in that circle.

Note: Where was Jim McCoy located in 2008-2009? Still in Texas?

Szabo also seemed to be mentoring that young Blogger Byrne during the Times we have been looking at. In fact Szabo's call for help was in a response to Byrne's post.

http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/04/bit-gold-markets.html?m=1

http://www.byrnehobart.com/blog/

[Gleb Gamow]

@ slaveforanunnak1

While we are still on the blog comments, here is a Szabo comment that made me realize a small difference of opinion between Szabo and Satoshi. It's about the use of the term Cryptocurrency.

*Satoshi used the term Cryptocurrency.
Quote from: satoshi on July 06, 2010, 06:32:35 PM
"Announcing version 0.3 of Bitcoin, the P2P cryptocurrency!"


*In 2011 Szabo still would not use the term Cryptocurrency.
Szabo Quote: from 2011
"And what's up with the term "cryptocurrency"? What is it supposed to mean? Cryptography is used to protect payments systems as radically different as credit cards, Chaumian digital cash, and Bitcoin. The term encourages the popular but profoundly naive view of Bitcoin as merely another form of digital cash."

Note: could be a misdirection by Szabo or maybe a sign of the doppelganger theory. It may not mean anything, just something I noticed.

Interesting. I'm starting to look more closely at Zooko

The thing with Zooko always comes back to money, or lack of it. He has several projects he is trying to get going but doesn't have the funds. He really cares about the new science he is into and I think if he had the coins, he would definitely be using them.

That's why I'm thinking he may have been the coder only. He was definitely posting about BitCoin on January 26 2009. He had the time to do the work. He knew the right people. He lived and worked in that circle.

Note: Where was Jim McCoy located in 2008-2009? Still in Texas?

Szabo also seemed to be mentoring that young Blogger Byrne during the Times we have been looking at. In fact Szabo's call for help was in a response to Byrne's post.

http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/04/bit-gold-markets.html?m=1

http://www.byrnehobart.com/blog/

http://financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/000571.html (with apologies for quoting all, found while on the hunt to address what's asked of us quoted above)

Financial Cryptography

Where the crypto rubber meets the Road of Finance...
« It's official - doing due diligence is a criminal offence! | Main | eBay migrates to the Payments business »
October 12, 2005

The Mojo Nation Story

[Guest post by Steve Schear] Mojo Nation was the brainchild of Jim McCoy (then formerly of Yahoo) and Doug Barnes (then formerly of C2Net). Their vision was a fully distributed peer-to-peer network with a financial mechanism that offered efficient cost recovery and discouraged the free-riding known to P2P people as leeching (a problem that continues to plague P2P).

The most radical element of MN was its method of pricing all activities in terms of network resources. It was also one of the first attempts at a P2P network using a fully distributed approach and a publishing versus a file sharing metaphor.

Unfortunately, MN was never fully operational. It never reached a point of deployment that allowed many of its novel architectural and technological assumptions, especially the mint, to be truly tested. It's not clear what economic lessons to draw from its operational vision, but here are some of the reasons behind its business failure:

- MN failed because it failed to get continued funding. It only received seed money from its founder, Jim McCoy. MN was in development before Napster but its greater complexity caused a delayed public release. Jim had the foresight to thoroughly investigate the legal aspects of P2P and architecture MN to segregate tracking and file storage and distance itself from either. Nevertheless, Napster's negative publicity closed the door on VC funding and development beyond beta testing.

- It failed because the UI never reached a point of maturity that enabled mostly automated meta-data tags (e.g., from mp3) to be generated from published content. This required users to tediously enter this data (and re-enter it when they were forced to republish, see below).

- It failed because software instabilities prevented its distributed servers from accumulating and retaining enough content and becoming stable (network effects). This instability required constant, manual, republishing of content by users who soon fatigued (user churn).

The most notable result from MN was Bram's Bit Torrent. Though, as we saw, Bram failed to heed warnings (and discussion at MN) about protecting the trackers until the MPAA/RIAA were able to shut many down. Its been reported that many of these shortcomings have been fixed but I still can't seem to get Azureus (the most popular BT client) to work as expected with the distributed tracking. Since the demise of eDonkey, et al, due to the MGM vs. Grokster BT has been given a shot at reassuming the P2P leadership mantle. I hope it succeeds. Or perhaps P2P's next growth will have to wait until enough its users discover the advantages of an anonymizing transport layers, like TOR and I2P.

Steve

Addendum: see Part 2 from Jim McCoy himself.

Posted by iang at October 12, 2005 08:22 AM | TrackBack
Comments
Bram didn't fail to heed warnings about attacks on trackers; he knew about them full well and would frequently explain them to people who wanted to use BitTorrent for illegal activities. Bram, as I understand it, didn't believe in making any software design changes for the sole purpose of supporting illegality.

Posted by: Aaron Swartz at October 18, 2005 05:30 PM

http://financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/000572.html

October 12, 2005

The Mojo Nation Story - Part 2

[Jim McCoy himself writes in response to MN1] Hmmm..... I guess that I would agree with most of what Steve said, and would add a few more datapoints.

Contributing to the failure was a long-term vision that was too complex to be implemented in a stepwise fashion. It was a "we need these eight things to work" architecture when we were probably only capable of accomplishing three or four at any one time. Part of this was related to the fact the what became Mojo Nation was originally only supposed to be the distributed data storage layer of an anonymous email infrastructure (penet-style anonymous mailboxes using PIR combined with a form of secure distributed computation; your local POP proxy would create a retrieval ticket that would bounce around the network and collect your messages using multiple PIR calculations over the distributed storage network....yes, you can roll your eyes now at how much we underestimated the development complexity...)

As Bram has shown, stripping MN down to its core and eliminating the functionality that was required for persistent data storage turned out to create a pretty slick data distribution tool. I personally placed too much emphasis on the data persistence side of the story and the continuing complexity of maintaining this aspect was probably our achilles heel, if we had not focused on persistence as a design goal and let it develop as an emergent side-effect things might have worked but instead it became an expensive distraction.

In hindsight, it seems that a lot of our design and architecture goals were sound, since most of the remaining p2p apps are working on adding MN-like features to their systems (e.g. combine Tor with distributed-tracker-enabled BitTorrent and you are 85% of the way towards re-creating MN...) but the importance of keeping the short- term goal list small and attainable while maintaining a compelling application at each milestone was a lesson that I did not learn until it was too late.

I think that I disagree with Steve in terms of the UI issues though. Given the available choices at the time we could have either created an application for a single platform or use a web-based interface. The only cross-platform UI toolkit available to us at the time (Tk) was kinda ugly and we didn't have the resources to put a real UI team together. If we were doing this again today our options would include wxWidgets for native UI elements or AJAX for a dynamic web interface, but at the time a simple web browser interface seemed like a good choice. Of course, if we had re-focused on file-sharing instead of distributed persistent data storage we could have bailed on Linux & Mac versions and just created a native win32 UI...

The other point worth mentioning is that like most crypto wonks, we were far too concerned with security and anonymity. We cared about these features so we assumed our users would as well; while early adopters might care the vast majority of the potential user base doesn't really care as much as we might think. These features added complexity, development time, and a new source of bugs to deal with.

Jim

[Gleb Gamow]

^^^Ironically, Steve Schear mentions Jeb McCaleb's eDonkey. The same Jeb McCaleb who founded Mt Gox.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenschear

Director of Business Development
Evil Geniuses For A Better Tomorrow
2000 – 2001 (1 year)

"Evil Geniuses for a Better Tomorrow was a startup company founded by Jim McCoy et al. to create MojoNation. After several years, the company ran out of money and laid off most of its employees; Bram Cohen went on to create BitTorrent and Zooko created Mnet out of MojoNation’s source code. The company’s name comes from the game Illuminati by Steve Jackson Games."

[Gleb Gamow]

Surely this is not the real L. Detweiler.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=385302

Name:   L.Detweiler
Posts:   25
Activity:   25
Position:   Newbie
Date Registered:   October 09, 2014, 05:19:11 PM
Last Active:   December 21, 2014, 05:55:21 AM

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=385324

Name:   S.Boxx
Posts:   25
Activity:   25
Position:   Newbie
Date Registered:   October 09, 2014, 08:00:14 PM
Last Active:   December 29, 2014, 09:53:37 PM

[Gleb Gamow]

eCache : Anonymous Digital Bearer Certificates: http://web.archive.org/web/20070629165051/https://ffij33ewbnoeqnup.onion.meshmx.com/doc.php

http://web.archive.org/web/20070629165430/https://ffij33ewbnoeqnup.onion.meshmx.com/readme.php

Credit where credit is due:
A big shoutout to Yodel of Yodelbank (external at Wikipedia) fame. He is the inventor of the COW currency and inspired us with his DBC format. Yodel: If you are alive and read this, come talk to us on the channel. There is some GG waiting for you.

The first 5 COW went to "SomePatches". You are officially user number ONE!

http://www.fact-index.com/y/yo/yodelbank.html

Yodelbank is a bank that relies on the Digital Monetary Trust-network (DMT), and the Invisible IRC Project (IIP) [1].
DMT is a threelayerd computer system. Its function is to abstract the identity of the account-owner from the accounts. That is, the accountholders transfer money into the DMT network, wich becomes the legal owners of the money. Then, the accountholders can make DMT transfer money as they like. The system builds on trust betwen the "bank" and the accountholders, hence the name.

Yodelbank is a bank that has all its assets in the DMT. Yodelbank has no physical office, instead it exists entierly inside the "cipherspace." The interface towards yodelbank is put inside IIP, an encrypted and pseudonymous internet relay chat. (IRC)

Because Yodelbank is put on top of DMT and the only way to communicate with yodelbank is through IIP, it is an entierly anonymous internet bank.

Yodelbank is not a registerd company. It exist entierly outside any countries law. The owner of yodelbank is also unknown.

DMT was borne out of James Ray Houston and Sonny Vleisides' Laissez Faire City via James Orlin Grabbe (JOG).

[cbeast]

He's trying to solve the problem of network access.

I don't understand why he thinks networks need to be redesigned with a Turing-complete block chain. You still need to trust the person that installs it.

Then I realized he is trying to redefine proof of work by creating tokens based on network access.Then I see he takes it back a notch and calls for limited use cases. Why not just stamp documents with Bitcoin?

I think there is a fundamental disagreement about the nature of work. There is a lot of development around PoS and its subset Proof of Existence as if Existence is some sort of compromise between stake and work. The cypherpunks are great with their privacy issues, but there is also a movement of ecopunks. Maybe some folks see the sun as a big waste of energy, but it's the thing that gives us life.

Hashing sha256 may seem like a trivial task, but if you look at the process rather than the product it makes sense. Hashing is done by the ones with the cheapest energy or the most efficient circuits.

Proving ownership is the foundation of fraud. Whether it's wealth or network resources, without provable really hard work there will be ways to spoof the system.

Now I'm not saying converting electricity to heat is the best way to show value. There are many resources to back currency. In the past we learned to smelt. We created money from that. Then we learned to print. We created money with that. Electricity is just how we currently make our existence. Future technologies will allow us to do things far more interesting than electronics and we'll be able to create value from that fundamental technology. I suspect quantum teleportation or entanglement may create the new money. Money is hard to make but easy to verify. It's a one way function. We should stay away from overly complex systems of financialization and computer networking can be made excessively complex. It's better to allow simple systems to interact and create emergent complexity.

[Crestington]

I came across this that was quite interesting written by Nick Szabo and provides a few more clues to the puzzle. He talks about the Cyberpunks as a small group working on traceless digital cash. Some of the references to pseudospoofing or use of sock puppet accounts still holds true today.

•To: ld231782@longs.lance.colostate.edu (L. Detweiler)
•Subject: SILLY FLAMES: pseudospoofing
•From: szabo@netcom.com (Nick Szabo)
•Date: Mon, 18 Oct 93 5:25:22 PDT
•Cc: cypherpunks@toad.com
•In-Reply-To: <9310180941.AA15703@longs.lance.colostate.edu>; from "L. Detweiler" at Oct 18, 93 3:41 am
 
 
L. Detweiler -- shocked, simply shocked, at the realization that
multiple pseudonyms are possible on the net -- explodes:

> ....how can this be a `forum' if an opinion
> is not *representative*?

Perhaps there are differences between a forum and a voting booth?

> what if a single person just `ganged up' on
> someone they didn't like by overwhelming them with pseudospoofs? what
> if there was *truly* support for some project but a pseudospoofer
> ganged up on the proponents and clobbered them with flames?

Perhaps "support" is better measured by how many people are motivated
enough to go to the effort to make multiple but individually unique,
reputable posts in favor of a proposition, rather than by
simple numerical polls that abstract away knowledge and
motivation, or by how many True Names position themselves
with I'm-on-your-side posts.

On cypherpunks' better days, "support" is measured by what kind
of code gets written, not by who flames whom how often under
how many names. Of course we all know that writing code
does not constitute *true* support, since only Democracy is
The One True Way.

> doesn't
> it throw every `conversation' on this list into spectacularly
> *grotesque* doubt?

Welcome to the Internet, Detweiler.  Perhaps you might get
together some physical meetings in Colorado, talk to more cypherpunks
on the phone, look at the pictures in Wired magazine (perhaps also
faked?), etc. if you are so concerned about being ganged up on by
unknown numbers of strangers.  (Is it better to be ganged up
on by known numbers of strangers?  Why of course, that's called
Democracy).

> the idea
> of `one man one vote' is SACRED.

Hallelujah!  Praise the Lord & pass the card punch!  Let's
vote ourselves bigger paychecks & unlimited medical care.
Let's take a vote on which cypherpunks tools we will implement.
Those who vote with the minority get to do the programming
work, those in the majority get to tell the minority what to write.
I nominate L. Detweiler President of the Cypherpunks.  All in favor
say "aye" and bow down to His Holiness of the Veiled Booth!

> it is
> *anti egaltarian*. it is a recipe for anarchy

God forbid!  Quick, Detweiler, get out your garlic, raise
up your cross and abjure these crypto-anarchists
before we spread any further!  Next thing you know
we'll get some elitist, anti-democratic development like
untraceable digital cash.  Some people will accumulate
more digicash than others, and Detweiler won't even know
who they are.  Horrors!  Quick Detweiler,
write your electronic leveling tax protocols before
its too late.  Better yet, get the majority to vote on
making us evil crypto-anarchists -- only a small cypherpunk
minority once our pseudonyms are unmasked, of course -- make
us write them for you.  After all, egalitarian software
is a basic human right!

> UNFAIR INFLUENCE. ABUSE
> OF POWER. MANIPULATION. DECEIT. TREACHERY. EXPLOITATION. SECRET CONSPIRACIES.
>...

Isn't it just dreadful?

> p.s. if anyone doesn't hear from me for awhile, assume I've been
> `liquidated' and this isn't really an `open forum' ...

Detweiler to be axed by untraceable crypto-moderator.  Can't figure
out how to make a pseudonym or use a remailer to avoid his fate in
Oblivion.  Graphic pictures at 11, may be unsuitable for children!

Nick Szabo            szabo@netcom.com

[Billbags]

Who......
I had never put the beginning of Wei Dai’s “bmoney” paper to much thought until it was brought to my attention by a software designer named Oleg Andreev. This information seems to be the “key” that Satoshi left for us to unlock the puzzle.

The first credit to Bitcoin in the white paper was a citation for Wei Dai’s “bmoney”.

The first paragraph of “bmoney”: (read carefully)

“I am fascinated by Tim May’s crypto-anarchy. Unlike the communities traditionally associated with the word “anarchy”, in a crypto-anarchy the government is not temporarily destroyed but permanently forbidden and permanently unnecessary. It’s a community where the threat of violence is impotent because violence is impossible, and violence is impossible because its participants cannot be linked to their true names or physical locations”. ~Wei Dai

Why......
The Internet and Bitcoin were created to allow people to solve social problems in a novel way: Instead of the ancient formula of “the strongest wins and then beats the crap out of the loser” we all can achieve a peaceful society where both rich and poor, strong and weak can protect their property and freedom on more equal grounds without relying on violent institutions like governments.

Why anonymous?
Tim May: “Anyone contemplating building such a system, or entity, or cybercorporation, should think long and hard about the wisdom of ever having an identifiable nexus of attack. Money must be collected in untraceable ways. This is what I meant about it being time to rethink the theory of the corporation.”

"Where once a corporation existed to both protect the rights of shareholders (against lawsuits and partners having to pay for losses) and to enable the group participation of many workers, corporations for the things Cypherpunks think are interesting is just a bad idea. And given the growing trend toward trying to prosecute the V.P of Yahoo-Europe because some bit of Nazi history was sold to some German citizen, etc., corporations are becoming a liability in cyberspace”.

"The answer is to vanish into cyberspace. Not an easy task, maybe, given the state of today’s tools, but the long term trend".

Summary......
Bitcoin is the exact implementation of the system envisioned by Tim C. May, Wei Dai, Nick Szabo, Hal Finney and Zooko. The only requirement is for transacting parties to remain anonymous. If there’s no trace to physical persons, there is no place for the violent intervention and thus the contracts can only be enforced according to the voluntarily agreed-upon rules between the parties. Bitcoin allows encoding these rules right in the transactions so they are automatically enforced by the whole network.

Tim May, Szabo, Hal, Alan Back, Jim McCoy, Zooko.....they all have a part in this.

*Ray Dillenger (Bear) quote: “Look, (Satoshi) was a construction made explicitly for the purpose of launching Bitcoin……That purpose is fulfilled.  The person who created (Satoshi) has no further need for him.  Thus ends the story”.

Note: it seems BitCoin was mostly created in the comment sections of the "Nanobarter", "BitGold" & "BitGold-Markets" papers. What happened in private emails and Meet-ups may never be known. Szabo & Zooko or maybe Jim McCoy? We may never know. IMHO...Szabo and Hal made all this possible in one way or another. They had dedicated their lives since at least 1993 to bring an anonymous digital currency to us.

[slaveforanunnak1]

Surely this is not the real L. Detweiler.

http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1993/10/msg00759.html

Many of the recent anon posts have been quite productive, eg
"Wonderer's" embarrassing newbie questions which motivated Hal
Finney to first write a nice explanation of digital cash, then
think of an interesting simplification of Chaum's scheme.  Under
any system falling short of truly intelligent filters,
Hal would not have filtered S. Boxx's first posts
without also filtering Wonderer's first posts.

LD Admits he is S.Boxx (oops!)

From:   IN%"ld231782@longs.lance.colostate.edu"  "L. Detweiler" 14-NOV-1993
To:     IN%"cypherpunks@toad.com"
CC:     IN%"ld231782@longs.lance.colostate.edu"
Subj:   Soothing Sayings

Mr. Barnes, you tried to convince me of the Joy of Pseudospoofing, for
which I suggested you were trying to convert me to the  Dark Side
(actually, I am indebtedly grateful for that beautiful inspiration for
my essay). You told me that E.Hughes' lectures on the subject of
pseudospoofing were what drew you to it in the first place! But this is
buried very deep in my comprehensive archives, from many weeks ago. (I
encourage all other cypherpunks to keep very good archives, because
some day we will be able to separate all the pseudospoofed identities
from real ones, and it will be quite shocking, I assure you. Some
prominent cypherpunks are extremely terrified and staunchly opposed to
archives, for obvious reasons.)

===========================================================================

Yes, LD, good archives certainly do help in catching pseudospoofers.
Like you. You have been using S.Boxx to post some of your rants and
create a false consensus - exactly what you have argued against so
loudly. How hypocritical can you get?

Why don't we post this on comp.risks and discredit him and his rants
once and for all? Enough of this crap!

--- MikeIngle@delphi.com

http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1993/11/msg00582.html

Re: LD Admits he is S.Boxx (oops!)

To: cfrye@ciis.mitre.org (Curtis D. Frye)
Subject: Re: LD Admits he is S.Boxx (oops!)
From: tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)
Date: Mon, 15 Nov 93 10:36:29 PST
Cc: cypherpunks@toad.com
In-Reply-To: <9311151601.AA09373@ciis.mitre.org>; from "Curtis D. Frye" at Nov 15, 93 11:01 am

> Kudos to Mike Ingle for his diligent record keeping and powers of
> observation.  As much as I like the computational solution for these
> problems, there's no substitute for documenting a mistake that blows
> somebody's cover.
>
> Curtis D. Frye

The S. Boxx = LD correlation has been obvious for several weeks. In
one notable case, S. Boxx quoted directly from private mail that had
been sent by Eric Hughes to L.D.

When confronted by this, L.D. waffled a bit and then mumbled something
about "of course cooperating with my colleague S. Boxx." For the next
several days he was careful to make casual references to "my
colleague."

As someone else told me, L.D. is a true casualty.

I'm trying to avoid discussing his situation on the List. The whole
matter has probably already driven people off the List, and more folks
may be on the verge. They joined the List to talk about the stuff we
are supposed to be discussing, and instead they get a dozen rants a
day from Detweiler and as many followups flaming him.

ObCrytp Note: Just got the English translation in paperback of the
Japanese-published "Encyclopedic Dictionary of Mathematics," a large
2-volume set with detailed articles on many branches of math. If the
math talked about in crypto is sometimes obscure to you, check this
out. The cost is $59, a real bargain these days.

--Tim May

What are the chances of some Satoshi Nakamoto being mentioned in "Encyclopedic Dictionary of Mathematics"?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/05/19/ted-nelson-says-that-bitcons-satoshi-nakamoto-is-shinichi-mochizuki/

I think it’s far more likely that the pseudonym was coined by someone heavily influenced by the cyberpunk literature: a lot of which, as we all know, was influenced by how people viewed the Tokyo of the 80s:

The economic and technological state of Japan in the 80s influenced Cyberpunk literature at the time. Of Japan’s influence on the genre, William Gibson said, “Modern Japan simply was cyberpunk.”

That would surely explain away May's purchase.

wait, i think you are mixing up cyberpunks and Cypherpunks

[Crestington]

I think this is pretty spot on, all information points to Nick Szabo having one of the largest roles as he worked on the idea. Jim McCoy and Szabo are the closest personalities to the Satoshi Pseudoname. I remember someone saying before that when working with Satoshi that if you got him angry, he would just call you an idiot and never speak to you again. This clue comes closer to Nick and Jim McCoy's battle where Nick forced out Jim's identity by prodding him a bit.

Who......
I had never put the beginning of Wei Dai’s “bmoney” paper to much thought until it was brought to my attention by a software designer named Oleg Andreev. This information seems to be the “key” that Satoshi left for us to unlock the puzzle.

The first credit to Bitcoin in the white paper was a citation for Wei Dai’s “bmoney”.

The first paragraph of “bmoney”: (read carefully)

“I am fascinated by Tim May’s crypto-anarchy. Unlike the communities traditionally associated with the word “anarchy”, in a crypto-anarchy the government is not temporarily destroyed but permanently forbidden and permanently unnecessary. It’s a community where the threat of violence is impotent because violence is impossible, and violence is impossible because its participants cannot be linked to their true names or physical locations”. ~Wei Dai

Why......
The Internet and Bitcoin were created to allow people to solve social problems in a novel way: Instead of the ancient formula of “the strongest wins and then beats the crap out of the loser” we all can achieve a peaceful society where both rich and poor, strong and weak can protect their property and freedom on more equal grounds without relying on violent institutions like governments.

Why anonymous?
Tim May: “Anyone contemplating building such a system, or entity, or cybercorporation, should think long and hard about the wisdom of ever having an identifiable nexus of attack. Money must be collected in untraceable ways. This is what I meant about it being time to rethink the theory of the corporation.”

"Where once a corporation existed to both protect the rights of shareholders (against lawsuits and partners having to pay for losses) and to enable the group participation of many workers, corporations for the things Cypherpunks think are interesting is just a bad idea. And given the growing trend toward trying to prosecute the V.P of Yahoo-Europe because some bit of Nazi history was sold to some German citizen, etc., corporations are becoming a liability in cyberspace”.

"The answer is to vanish into cyberspace. Not an easy task, maybe, given the state of today’s tools, but the long term trend".

Summary......
Bitcoin is the exact implementation of the system envisioned by Tim C. May, Wei Dai, Nick Szabo, Hal Finney and Zooko. The only requirement is for transacting parties to remain anonymous. If there’s no trace to physical persons, there is no place for the violent intervention and thus the contracts can only be enforced according to the voluntarily agreed-upon rules between the parties. Bitcoin allows encoding these rules right in the transactions so they are automatically enforced by the whole network.

Tim May, Szabo, Hal, Alan Back, Jim McCoy, Zooko.....they all have a part in this.

*Ray Dillenger (Bear) quote: “Look, (Satoshi) was a construction made explicitly for the purpose of launching Bitcoin……That purpose is fulfilled.  The person who created (Satoshi) has no further need for him.  Thus ends the story”.

Note: it seems BitCoin was mostly created in the comment sections of the "Nanobarter", "BitGold" & "BitGold-Markets" papers. What happened in private emails and Meet-ups may never be known. Szabo & Zooko or maybe Jim McCoy? We may never know. IMHO...Szabo and Hal made all this possible in one way or another. They had dedicated their lives since at least 1993 to bring an anonymous digital currency to us.

[monsanto]

Another reason to lay low...

http://www.wired.com/2014/12/finney-swat/

[slaveforanunnak1]

Another reason to lay low...

http://www.wired.com/2014/12/finney-swat/

I know, i feel bad now for even starting this thread again. God damn it is so interesting though.

[monsanto]

Another reason to lay low...

http://www.wired.com/2014/12/finney-swat/

I know, i feel bad now for even starting this thread again. God damn it is so interesting though.

I know exactly what you mean.  I think we will find out sooner or later, either because someone will want to use Satoshi's coins or if the founders think that such a large concentration of btc in unknown hands has become a larger market issue.  I've read a lot of Szabo's posts and he seems like the kind of person who couldn't pass up the opportunity to use that level of wealth to attempt big things (private robotic space exploration, etc) like an Elon Musk type.

[darkmule]

Another reason to lay low...

http://www.wired.com/2014/12/finney-swat/

As much as the scum who pull these life-threatening "pranks" piss me off, the real problem is we have a hyper-militarized police that acts like an occupying army and treats normal citizens as the enemy.  They're ready to go full Rambo at the drop of a hat, and even a 12 year old calling with a flagrantly bogus swatting gets their own personal army from these steroid-riddled buffoons.

[slaveforanunnak1]

Another reason to lay low...

http://www.wired.com/2014/12/finney-swat/

As much as the scum who pull these life-threatening "pranks" piss me off, the real problem is we have a hyper-militarized police that acts like an occupying army and treats normal citizens as the enemy.  They're ready to go full Rambo at the drop of a hat, and even a 12 year old calling with a flagrantly bogus swatting gets their own personal army from these steroid-riddled buffoons.

I do believe in monsters...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXODzzagzCw

[ipoop2much]

I'm just gonna leave a few links here.

http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-dawn-of-trustworthy-computing.html

Great thread. But who is "Nick Szabo"?( that's a lot of "aka's" listed there )

Andrew N Szabo, ~48
Madison, WI
Known also: Andrew Nicholas Szabo · Alexander Szabo · Andrew A Szabo · Andrew E Szabo · Alexander Azabo · Nicholas Szabo

Lived in: Madison, WI · Providence, RI · Cupertino, CA · Somerville, MA · Etna, NH

Related to: Andreas Kammer ~42 · Nicholas Szabo ~84 · Alexander Szabo ~52 · Marcia Szabo ~82 · Douglas Kammer ~69

[numismatist]

Great thread. But who is "Nick Szabo"?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Szabo

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto

[slaveforanunnak1]

Great thread. But who is "Nick Szabo"?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Szabo

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto

[Gleb Gamow]

I'm just gonna leave a few links here.

http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-dawn-of-trustworthy-computing.html

Great thread. But who is "Nick Szabo"?( that's a lot of "aka's" listed there )

Andrew N Szabo, ~48
Madison, WI
Known also: Andrew Nicholas Szabo · Alexander Szabo · Andrew A Szabo · Andrew E Szabo · Alexander Azabo · Nicholas Szabo

Lived in: Madison, WI · Providence, RI · Cupertino, CA · Somerville, MA · Etna, NH

Related to: Andreas Kammer ~42 · Nicholas Szabo ~84 · Alexander Szabo ~52 · Marcia Szabo ~82 · Douglas Kammer ~69

You forgot his brother, Frank, the rabbit breeder in Ohio.

[Billbags]

I'm just gonna leave a few links here.

http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-dawn-of-trustworthy-computing.html

Great thread. But who is "Nick Szabo"?( that's a lot of "aka's" listed there )

Andrew N Szabo, ~48
Madison, WI
Known also: Andrew Nicholas Szabo · Alexander Szabo · Andrew A Szabo · Andrew E Szabo · Alexander Azabo · Nicholas Szabo

Lived in: Madison, WI · Providence, RI · Cupertino, CA · Somerville, MA · Etna, NH

Related to: Andreas Kammer ~42 · Nicholas Szabo ~84 · Alexander Szabo ~52 · Marcia Szabo ~82 · Douglas Kammer ~69

You forgot his brother, Frank, the rabbit breeder in Ohio.

That link had me going in circles last year. I finally gave up on trying to decode it? What is your view of its meaning? Why would Nick(Mr. Secret Mystery about himself) have a link with his brothers address in the middle of nowhere on it?
http://web.archive.org/web/20070209042638/http://mysite.verizon.net/resp9fau/index.html

Note: there was also a comment on one of his blogs claiming to be another of Nicks brothers. Nick actually confirmed it in the following post. Nick was talking about the origin of the name Szabo and his brother was talking about their dad or something. I can't find it right now, but I'll keep looking.

Update: Found it. Paul Szabo...http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2006/10/fifty-years-ago-today.html?m=1